Every Fire You Tend

sigh

I know your shame.

I carry it with me, that shame, that most private part of you. Ever since I was entrusted with that cryptic emotion, I haven’t taken my eyes off of you, off of the historic secret inscribed on your face. Before the mother who bore you and the father who dreamed you up had themselves come into this world, you were already a doleful visage conjured by your ancestors, the final entry in a searing elegy imparted from flesh to flesh. You do not know how to read what is written on your face. You do not know the source of your latent shame, do not know how to speak of it, let alone string its sentences together, and so it weighs on you as an affliction, stunting your growth.

Only in the thrall of emotions you recognize does that writing on your forehead disappear. When your lips curl in contempt, for example, or when your eyes well up with longing, not a single word of shame remains etched on your face. Sometimes, though, when your mind begins to wander and you’re torn from this time, unfamiliar emotions envelop you, and you can’t remember a thing. That’s when I find you, aching from head to toe with the obscure memory of an event you never lived through.

—

This morning when I arrived, you were lost in thought, caught in the cross breeze, on a threshold opening into the depths of your melancholy. Wearied by sleeplessness, your spirit snagged itself upon objects around you: the swaying tulle curtains, the photographs on the wall, the little spider dangling from the web it prudently let loose; it tumbled its way to your body, the home of your introspections, carrying with it all those intimations of the world, while you lay there in bed, passive in body but agonizing in mind, trying to fend off these unwanted intrusions. You spirit had departed to another plane altogether, and you were left suddenly alone, among strangers who wouldn’t say a single word to help you. All those strangers standing on the other side of the threshold, wandering the labyrinth of your melancholy, calling you on a journey without return, into the boundless universe of your introspections. One of them, an old woman, her hair so white it seemed ice blue; another, a holy man, his face pallid, sprung from the sanguine legends of the spring festivals. You recognized them both but didn’t know from where. The middle door of your introspections opened upon a fig tree. There on that threshold, you breathed in the scent of its bitter leaves, observed its white branches twisting outward, heavy with purple fruit.

You weren’t there with me. All I could see in your place was the ache in your bones, the sweat on your hands, and the pain in the hollow of your groin. You were in a wretched state. Your I had shrunk in that ancient agony, all the time you’d lived through condensed into a fig seed. Doubled over in bed, you listened to the throbbing of your flesh, afraid to open your eyes, your arms covering your face. You wanted to close the door that opened onto your melancholy. Or perhaps you were desperate to escape, to leap into another time in which you’d never been born and would therefore never die, a realm beyond the world’s many insinuations. A centennial distance loomed between us. We stood on the same piece of earth, sundered into different times. I watched you splintering apart. You were the protagonist of an anguished story, borrowing the consciousness of a woman from another time, a victim’s consciousness, one that continues to loom large in the present. You mutilated yourself with your self. What’s more, you were afraid of a phantom whose fresh sweat you could still smell on your sheets, undeniably tangible and passing through your time. You and your phantom had emerged anew from the Hıdrellez flames.  

Let me tell you about the first Hıdrellez flames you ever saw, a story from a time before you existed, when your conscience was just being woven together, some seventy years ago. You were elemental as a new spark, a mad-hot stone in the heart of a fire, a dry branch that crackled with the first lick of flame. Your eyes that watched everything were the silver-dappled stones. You were a place on that mountainside, and you were the otherworldly aura that permeated the place. That day, you were both the burning fire and the person who warmed herself beside it.

Forty people with packs on their backs, weary from walking for days on end, weak from living off only wild spinach, gathered around a fire, taking solace in each other. The children smelled of urine, and everyone, with their shorn clothes and jackets, looked utterly ruined. They hadn’t yet realized that they were exiles. The deep guilt of having survived had plunged them into silence. Afraid of stepping back into the nightmarish, bloody landscape that they had left behind, they refused to sleep. Water, fire, and bread had taken on entirely new meanings: water smelled of blood, fire screamed, and bread turned into a sacred pittance they hoped would fall from the heavens. These people gathered around the fire had lost their fear of dying. Besides, they were so lifeless now that it would be impossible to kill them further. Ever since they’d gotten off the train from Elazığ, their spirits had been utterly numb. As they continued onward, burying those who couldn’t withstand the fever and the hunger, the world itself became another affliction. They were like Job, who beseeched God that his spirit had grown weary of his body: all realms known and unknown, all seven tiers of heaven and seven tiers of earth, had become for them no more than a body writhing in pain.

There was a man named Cafer among them. His right eye was wrapped tight with a bloody rag while the other was bright red. As if he had left this eye uncovered not to see but to weep. Swaying back and forth, he began muttering as if speaking to the fire, as if the fire was the only thing that could understand him. Words rolled around in his mouth. O Hızır, he moaned, O Hızır, my unseen brother, where are you? At the throne of God, or here on earth? Do you stand before Moses, do you sit beside Gabriel?

Meanwhile, night was overtaking the land. A deceptive stillness enshrouded everything, the light playing tricks as it reflected off the jagged cliffs. The outlines of the trees on the mountainside slowly became indistinct, and all the pathways and passes disappeared in the twilight. Gathered around the fire, the abject figures melted away, replaced by their black, hunched silhouettes. Cafer’s reproachful entreaty to Hızır suddenly coalesced in a rhythmic prayer the forty of them sang together, forging a clandestine bond between serenity and sorrow. They were submitting themselves to their faith in God. There in that leaden stillness, as Cafer’s voice filled the air with tension, a girl stood up and calmly brushed off her skirt.

That girl was your father’s mother, Bese. Bese had a small beauty mark below her lower lip where her mother would always kiss her, a small gesture of her love. Bese, now the sole survivor of all her extended family. Ever since she had seen her brother’s body drifting along the Munzur River, she had taken a vow of silence, to be broken only when absolutely necessary.

Bese began to walk, slowly at first. Nobody gave her a second glance as she wandered into the nearby copse, assuming perhaps that she was going to urinate. If they had only paid heed to the tautness of her back, to her jutting shoulder blades, to the speed with which she was now walking, to the fact that she was no longer limping, they might have realized that hers was a strange departure.

Bese didn’t return that night. The others scattered in all directions, setting out to search for the girl. They didn’t have the fortitude to lose another, nor could they live with themselves if she had died, if she had fallen somewhere and gotten stuck, and they had left her behind. Wearily, they searched for Bese. When they lost their voices from shouting, they clashed stones together. They shuddered at the calls of birds of prey and started at every rolling stone or rustling branch, and soon, legends about Bese began to circulate among them. One would say that Bese was with them still, only now invisible; another, that she had died long before, but her spirit had only just departed; another still, that she must have gotten mixed up with djinns.

I don’t know anything about djinns, clamored one old woman, but if we give up on Bese we give up on her entire lineage. I’m not leaving until we find that girl!

On the morning of the third day, Bese appeared out of nowhere. Half naked, her hair disheveled, her arms and knees bleeding and bruised. Her ribs were pressing into her lungs, so she was barely able to speak. She seemed to have undergone a profound transformation, her timidness abandoned for an air of defiance, a readiness to pick a fight. She shunned everyone with her intransigence, placing an insurmountable distance between herself and her tribe. The knowledge that all beings had been leavened by the same stardust brought her only empty consolation now. To survive, she needed to approach life differently. Resurrected with a new grief and a new set of ethics, Bese had been born again, this time through another wound.

Where were you? they asked her.

I saw Hızır, she replied without hesitation, as if explaining something entirely ordinary. He was on his grey horse, staring at me. He gestured for me to come, so I went.’

As she spoke, a profound sorrow spread over her face, almost identical to the expression latent on yours. How exactly you’re going to step free from this sorrow, etched as it is into the fabric of your soul, is something I’m still wondering myself. 

Now you’ve entered the age of figs. You’re ready to show and tell all, on the brink of offering your honeyed core to life. You even have a fig tree, there, blocking your living room window. You’ve learned how to get by on the feeble light filtering through its broad leaves. The tree’s shadow casts another dimension into your daily life. At first, anyone who visited you at home would have to listen to you talk at length about it, let you translate for the fig without its permission. In fact, you often got carried away, telling visitors that the fig leaf resembles a giant hand, the hand of the goddess Demeter. You bestowed meanings on the leaves that leaves can’t bear. After all, every life is defined by such meanings. And you were defined by figs.

Before you rented your current apartment, when you were wandering from realtor to realtor in Beşiktaş, you insisted that you wanted a small, ground-floor apartment, and moreover, one that came with a fig tree, telling those who looked at you with bewilderment that the time had come to live with a fig tree. As if that sentence made the slightest sense… They gave up looking for a flat altogether, thinking a fig tree was all you were after. Muammer, with his Coke-bottle glasses, was the only realtor who took your request seriously. I love walnut trees, he told you in his nasal voice, smoothing his hair from its part down the middle. His shoulders were covered in dandruff. You tried not to stare at his yellow teeth as he prattled on about how sleeping under a walnut tree always left him in a gentle daze, waiting patiently for this dull banter to end. The only thing you and Muammer had in common was trees. But your eyes, they couldn’t see past figs.

The first thing you did after you signed the lease was name the fig tree in your garden. You called it Zevraki, claiming the name meant both boat and wood. The nickname of an Alevi bard who died long ago. You’ve always loved the letter Z. Every word that Z passes through seems to you caught in paradox, half dead and half alive. Everything Z touches: azure, zephyr, zero, zenith… Z blazes like fire, freezes like ice. Zevraki, that seemingly musical name, circumscribed the tree, enclosed it in a place oscillating between dream and reality. Ignorant as to the sex of your tree, you attempted to graft it with the name of a poet. It’s not natural, what you did. All it does is reinforce the recursive cycle by which civilizations build the logic of their own undoing into their very foundations. Naming something forces it to adapt to you; it is the first step toward domesticating all of earth’s creatures, the rageless and meek, the plain and serene. Regardless of the name you gave it, the only thing you will ever see in the tree is a semblance of yourself. I have to admit, though, that the names you come up with do always suit the thing being named. I don’t know how you do it, but it seems to me that your naming recreates it anew. Ever since you named the fig tree in your garden Zevraki, I’ve been drifting upon an ocean, the same poem restless in my mind:

if the waves rose high, higher than the north star, if they swelled past the limits of the vaulted sky, and if they swept into even the ninth heaven, surged beyond the throne of god, still zevraki would remain above the surface of that vast sea. 

How do you think fig trees were born? Did they fashion themselves according to the angle of the sunlight, or to the appetites of the birds and bugs in their surroundings? How did they come into being, and in which time zone? Your Zevraki, for example… When I think about the endless cycle that culminated with Zevraki, I imagine a tendril secreting a milky poison, sprouting from beneath a lapis stone on a silvery Syrian cliffside overlooking the Mediterranean. Long before Adam and Eve covered their private parts with its leaves, it was a bastard that grew of its own accord.

It’s almost as if we exist because figs do, think of it that way. The fig is a scion that spread by imagining humans before it had ever encountered them. It conceived of the fire that would fall into the womb of the first woman to eat its fruit, of the moment she splits it with her two hands; it conceived of the thumping that fire would start in her chest, of the sweet ache in her groin; and it conceived of the honey that would flow from her lips upon her first bite, of the carnal prowess of that honey. It wished for men as it grew, men who gathered together to play their frame drums and sing ghazals as they drank rakı distilled from figs; it wished that the songs they breathed into the air would help them reach lovers waiting in the world beyond. It designed roots to spread like vortexes along the surface of the earth, building nests for snakes slithering silently among them. This was how the dual bond between figs and snakes began. Over time, the shadow of the fig tree became the gathering place for punishment and praise, for poison and antidote, for arousal and calm. Eventually, its roots meandered underground. It emerged among humans in strange places, splitting the walls and cracking the foundations of derelict homes across the four corners of Mesopotamia. In time, of course, the fig became something of a demigod. In an age when innumerable gods and goddesses and human-animal hybrids began to converge in the fabric of a singular creator, the fig held its place in the world with a terrifying depravity, a symbol of the singularity in the plural and the plurality in the singular. And so, as the fig became a mysterious creature that consorts with snakes, a creature that sees, that knows, that speaks in whispers to the night, humankind began to treat it like a being from another world.

The Arameans gave the fig its first name, calling